Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was born near Hanover and grew up in Königsberg in a secular Jewish family. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger at Marburg and Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg (1929). Briefly arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris, where she worked for Jewish refugee organizations; interned at Gurs in 1940, she escaped and reached New York in 1941. Stateless for eighteen years, she became an American citizen in 1951, the year this book appeared. Her later works include The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and the posthumous The Life of the Mind; she taught at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt's attempt to understand how the Nazi and Soviet regimes, which she treats as a new form of government without precedent, could arise out of European history. It was published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951 (in Britain as The Burden of Our Time).
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